“After that event and before, I have always been in touch with
David. Me and him get along really well," Kohli told Fox
Cricket commentator Adam Gilchrist during a candid
interview.

"I’ve always been in touch with him. He’s always nice to send me
a text after games and he has been very kind to me.

"It takes two people to break bad air which may be created on
the field."

Giving his thoughts on the aftermath of the Cape Town fiasco,
Kohli expressed his shock at the hostile reception that met
tampering co-conspirators Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron
Bancroft.

The trio was hounded at airports by packs of media upon their
return to Australia – "treated like criminals", as Gilchrist put
it.

Kohli said he felt sorry for what the players and their families
were forced to endure.

"Apart from all of the competitiveness on the field and all the
battles you have, you never want to see such a magnitude of
something happen to sportsmen," Kohli said.

"What happened after (the ball-tampering incident)... I felt
very bad. I felt like the things that happened after shouldn't have
happened.

"The thing that hit me the hardest was the way they were
recieved at the airports and the way they were escorted out.

“It is not my place to comment on the decisions, but to treat
people like that, for me, it was unpleasant to see.

"How they were treated, I would never want to experience that as
a cricketer."

An honest Kohli also admitted to his own transgressions in years
gone by.

On his first tour to Australia in the summer of 2011/12, he
infamously raised the middle finger to the parochial fans at the
Sydney Cricket Ground in response to being heckled.

Later, in the 2014/15 Test series Down Under, the passionate
Kohli was involved in many verbal stoushes.

But the world's No.1 ranked Test and ODI batter, now 30, insists
he's found the formula to keeping his emotions in check.

“I’ve always been myself. I’ve never tried to be someone else
because of someone else’s opinion, and hence I learned from my own
mistakes and realised my own mistakes and corrected them through
the journey,” he explained.

“I am massively different from the first two tours (in
Australia) – especially the first when I was so bad.

“I did not have a good understanding of where to draw the line.
Those are things I would not say I regret, but things I look at as
mistakes.

"But (they were) mistakes that were important for me to commit
so I could learn from them.

“I was never a perfect mould of a typical old-school cricketer.
I just wanted to find my own way and I guess those things were part
of that journey.”

Kohli is currently skippering India against Australia in the
opening Test of a four-match series.

He was dismissed for three in the first innings thanks to a
brilliant catch by Usman Khawaja before falling for a hard-fought
34 in the second dig.